Abstract Thoughts

In praise of being a bit nebulous

I appear to be someone who gets stuck quite often. A friend sent me a meme that said “I need a day in between each day, just to recover from the day before and get ready for the next day” and it rang true. It’s hard to practice self-acceptance when you feel like somehow you should be finding things easier.

Thankfully, I appear to finally be surrounded by folks who ‘get it’. In the same day, my art director will show me patience while I root around somewhat blindly until I land on the ‘mood’ for a book, a friend will send a text that’s little more than just ‘I too experience this’ regarding feeling like a constant burnout risk, or an expert will unlock another piece of the puzzle to help me understand how to be a more effective ‘me’ (and not the many ‘someone elses’ I’ve tried to be). Friends will also offer needed perspective, backed by evidence but delivered with hugs and mugs of tea.

At home this week, my neighbour silently and graciously hung out the washed sheets I forgot to remove from our communal machine, and it made me well up because it reminded me of my grandad who used to quietly mend and polish my shoes when I was over, returning them good-as-new to the door without saying a word. Neighbours who see the pain points and pour oil on them, how rich I am.

I didn’t always know that it was ok to admit to getting stuck so often, but all of these tender acts- these tender people- have rewritten my narrative, allowed me to begin to let go of the old and unhelpful ways of being tense, feeling too responsible and working to the point of exhaustion, driven by scarcity. Life, friends, is far too sweet to live that way, and I wish my life to be both long and sweet.

Yours can be sweet too.

So here is a physical practice that is helping and becoming a bit exciting.

Earlier in the year, I started to just paint abstracts. It was the only thing that would get me moving from my paralysis. Some key conversations with one of the best people I’ve ever met, Julia, who is my art director at Walker Books, made me feel I could give this a bit of time.

It feels a bit funny at first, to just be blobbing paint around and wondering what on earth you’re doing and why you’re even doing it. Many of them were ugly, unsatisfying, plain silly. Most of the time I was thinking “I’ve got several children’s books to get on with illustrating for work and children’s book are decidedly figurative, NOT this indistinguishable fluff”.

The thing about surrendering to a process though, and this process in particular, is that there is no way around that resistance, only through. The truth is, even in my children’s book art, I’ve longed to see my work loosen up a lot more. My older work feels like it is of a certain time in my development, and I honour that but also I want to let it go and search for something that feels more daring, more free, more unmistakably me. I want it to sing off the page as it does in my mind’s eye, but there’s a gap to close there between dreams and hands.

For some reason, it has been hard to tell my over-trained hands to do this (and it has been ten times harder to do this with the written word), but working in abstract has finally unlocked something. The tenderness which others have shown me, the healing that has occurred in my own cells, all these things have started to travel to my fingertips in a way that makes the lines and brushstrokes I see reflected back at me feel more like ‘home’. I don’t understand it, but I love it.

Ah, that must be what ‘surrender’ feels like.

Just as life has filtered into this art practice, the practice is now filtering back out into life, making it new. I’m in a period of change, of letting go, of serious things but also light things. They say a caterpillar must dissolve into goo before it becomes a butterfly and this abstract art-making would appear to be the chrysalis in which I allow myself to dissolve for a while, to be a mere messy little bug, observing and painting dust motes and water droplets until the next chapter. It’s daunting, exhilarating but it’s also very much time. I don’t need to be a safe little larvae anymore, I want those glorious wings.

I know these are grandiose poetic thoughts for someone who is ostensibly an anonymous almost middle-aged woman in the middle of nowhere- like, I write these things down and I think “Do you hear yourself, woman? Calm down, be normal!”- but I know that many of you hold these secret thoughts too, these things that long to see the light.

So, it’s ok. We are tiny bugs but also part of this infinite cosmos. Let’s become goo together, then let’s go and see it all and wonder at it all like we did when we were tiny. Everything is waiting for us.